 Welcome. Welcome to coast to coast. My name is Lily Weinberg. I'm here joined by my colleague, Lillian Kral. Hey, Lillian. Hi, Lillian. How are you? Good. Good to see you another week. I know. Here we got. My run had ended. We thought, yes, for audience members who are just joining and who weren't with us last week. So, Lillian, we'll be adding another family member, a little girl soon. So, so for all the parents out there, you all know the date, the due date is of course moves around. So we never know. So I'm so happy that you're here with us to have another episode talking about the future of our cities. So it's been a wild ride. It has been, and I'm excited about today's show, Lily, because, as you know, I am a lover of data, not a friend is. And so I really love that, that aspect of today's conversation. Yeah, yeah, I'm excited about it. I mean, I think there's a couple of things about this. So I think this really gets to how we can be looking at building more equitable parks and how data can be leveraged to inform, you know, decision making around our green spaces in our communities. We'll also look at interesting enough how community driven best practices that cities can be used for, you know, equitably reimagining their public spaces. We're also will impact questions on how to support local neighborhood groups, engaging with city government, which, which you know very well what that can potentially look like. And really shifting the power kind of around the decision making, as we work towards common goals and public spaces. And we have a really great example of this with the 10 minute walk campaign, which, which now and Benita can tell us more about this, but I believe hundreds and hundreds of mayors have signed up for this across the country. And so I'm eager to hear more. Anything else that you want us to tease out of this conversation. I mean, I think you hit it and I just sort of want to highlight that I mean I think part of why I love the work that we get to do at night is that there really is this very strong focus on how do we shift the power back to the community and think about engagement, and having conversations with folks about this like think about engagement, not as a luxury, but really as a critical part of the process that actually makes our public projects and our public spaces better. And so I think there's a lot of work that night is doing across communities that really proves that point and there's no better time than now. And as cities are really having to reimagine their design, but they look like how their spaces are used really like demonstrate that again it's not just nice to engage to the public here and there it's actually really critical and it's actually going to be part of the way that we get out of this pandemic situation. Excited about that. Well said, well said for sure. And I'm an eager to tease that out a bit. Okay, so, so I want to welcome Benita Hussain, the 10 minute walk director with the trust for public land and Carrie entrance, the executive director of the North and neighborhood organization a community nonprofit and St. Paul. Welcome Benita and welcome Carrie thanks for joining us on coast to coast. So I'm going to just do some level setting for how this is going to work. So we're going to take about 15 minutes to do a quick interview between the two of you and me. And then my colleague Lillian Corral will jump in and she's going to be taking questions from the audience live and so audience members, what you're going to see at the bottom is you're going to see a Q&A button down there and that's where you can put in your questions that that we can elevate to Benita and Carrie. And if you're watching on Facebook, hashtag night live, and you can put your questions there we will be following them. So with that, let's get started. Welcome, thanks guys for joining me on Benita I want to start with with you. And if you can just tell us a bit, give us some context for what the 10 minute walk campaign is. How does it work and and how does it work specifically in cities across the country. I think you gave a really good high level overview of the work that we do. But 10 minute walk campaign is a national initiative that is led by the trust for public land, alongside several national community partners including Carrie, really about bringing parks and green space within an easy 10 minute walk up home for all urban residents by 2050. We have a really strong sense that you know we want to create environments and cities that are greener healthier, and are engaging city leadership, as you mentioned mayors to really drive us, you know, in a long term ambitious way. We have about 300 mayors clock side on to this to the initiative. And we really think of ourselves as partners for all of these cities in helping make that progress, whether that is helping them figure out how to target their investments in equitable ways, map mapping and we'll talk about data in a little bit, but also ensuring that there are community voices at the table, especially in our most ambitious cities that have demonstrated this desire to hit this really high level to target. So it's, it's a really exciting national initiative to work on, but with very hyper local needs and hyper local impacts that we were just really excited to talk to you about today. Fantastic thanks for the overview and and that community piece is is so important for the 10 minute wall campaign like what does this look like on the ground and communities and Carrie. You are the example of this of this work and in the north end. So tell us a bit about how the 10 minute wall campaign works on the ground and the north end. So first of all, I want to say that I'm not one of the I'm one of like six, I think grantees for the 10 minute walk program in St. Paul. So I want to just talk very, very briefly about our organization and the other organizations were part of a system of 17 district councils that make up the seven very unique neighborhoods in the city of St. Paul. And we actually work to magnify and empower community members from the ground up and have decision making come from the ground up instead of top down. And we also give residents a constructed establish an ongoing way to give their voices those decisions once I said can be made from the bottom up. I think that this campaign really is helping us to build our capacity to be able to do that and to really focus on parks and green space which is inherently important to I think all of our neighborhoods and we're much better to understand now the gaps that we see in some park services, especially with all of our residents that live in our neighborhoods and to be able to actually ensure that all of our residents have a voice in deciding what should happen to the parks and recreation centers and also the green spaces. For the noise and we have actually been lucky enough to create something called friends of the north end parks. So we've started with three of our main parks and we've had a really great response from our community to actually come out and we're meeting in the actually distance, of course, to talk about what should this park look like, what is necessary here who lives around the park, what improvements we could make so that group will ultimately encompass all of the parks and green spaces hopefully in the north end and they'll advocate and make those connections that are hugely important to us all. So that's really helpful and I and I and I can see how valuable it would be to be able to clearly understand what the gaps are within the community, and and on top of that, how do we, how do we make sure and Lillian touch upon this too in her remarks like how do we really make sure this is resident driven this is this is driven by the community. So, so I do want to dig into that more. But before we get to that, but needs a I want to hear a bit more from you. Can you talk to us about why this work and this work that you're doing the work that carries doing during a pandemic is possibly arguably more relevant than ever. And if you can just tell us I mean what's so interesting about your position is you're you're seeing this from a national level you're learning from a lot of different cities if you can tell us a bit about what you're you're seeing and learning from from different communities. Sure. So the, I think all of us can agree that sort of now more than ever we've seen the value of these public spaces and nature really in, especially in the last four months. I, you know, I do want to ensure them sort of giving a shout out to many of the mayors and cities that and communities that have prioritized parks over, you know, the last three years since the campaign was launched. And I think that we, you know, we look to those leaders help provide the voice of, you know, those in power to ensure that cities are and communities are still prioritizing parks and green space. But as we've seen in the last four months, the fact that they have been essential for our mental and physical health and wellness, essential for ensuring that there are spaces for communities to have civic discourse and and protest injustices in their communities. And certainly to ensure that people still feel connected to each other and they can still see their friends and family and we really have seen the rise of the national level of of how important these spaces are just for us as individuals and communities. I think that as we look to the future and see what will be, you know, $350 billion shortfall and budgets across the across the country. We feel it's very important to ensure that, you know, parks don't fall to the bottom of the pile when it comes to budget cuts, we really want to make sure that we've that we've all highlighted this idea that parks are really, really important for communities. And I mean, see it happening, you know, communities have come up with really creative ways of ensuring all residents have that access, whether it's through opening streets to pedestrian traffic and bicycle and bicycles and then also for restaurants and small businesses to have street dining. And we're seeing that with, you know, the potential rise of outdoor classrooms I mean the services that these spaces provide it's just essential. And we think that this is going to be a real national conversation going forward. And I think that the, the idea of targeting and making sure these spaces are equitably distributed. As we talk about sort of data and ensuring that we're helping guide those investments. I think that will continue to be a very, very important part of the conversation as well. I want to, I want to dig a little bit into that Benita like that that data piece. Can you tease out like how does that that work, especially as we think about the equitable investments tell me tell me how that that works in communities. Yeah, so we so the campaign, you know, has 300 cities. We really again try to partner with all of them around helping them adopt this 100% target park access, but also making sure that when we're talking about park access we're not just saying, it's about it just popping down a park space anywhere right it's about making sure that the communities park spaces are again equitably distributed that they're responsive to the community needs and programmed in ways that make sense for those local residents that they have positive outcomes around climate resilience and health and economic growth. And so in order to do that we really have to refine and look at what types of basically map our cities and figure out where are the where the places that are most in need of parks and green space and the benefits that they provide. So, at the trust for public lands, we're very lucky that we have some very comprehensive data so on the technology side, we have a program called Park serve, which has mapped 14,000 cities and communities, Parkland, down to like the very, very most micro level. And we've been able to slice the data across demographics across age groups across income levels, and help optimize in each city about five spaces where we think cities can help target their municipal investments in these spaces. So from a technological level, we have we have the ability to do that, but I always always ensure that when we can, you know, engineer our way through some problems, but we always have to make sure that community driven data and community feedback is also as important for and that feedback is as important for municipal planning as technological data. And that is part of the reason why we have seated grantees like Kerry's team on the ground in many of our cities to ensure that they have the ability and the space to provide that community level data to ensure again these parks are responsive to their communities. Now that I mean that's that's extremely valuable that data that you're providing in the communities and, and what's interesting about this and I heard this other day I can't remember who said it but but it's, it's, it's much more than just proximity that you know having not all 10 minute walks are created equal either so it's thinking about that piece to which is which I think is really important. So Kerry, I want to I want to talk a bit about about this data piece and and how this actually works on the ground in the north end and and and how, what are you seeing and learning and how, how is your community pivoting and real time during this pandemic. Yeah, I'm that's a that's a really, really good question for neighborhood organizations to take a real look at that about how we previously before COVID engaged our community compared to how we're doing it now with, especially with all of the stay at home orders, and with all of the thought processes we all have including our residents with you know distance learning and so many complications and challenges. So I think at least you know the north end has really restructured the way we're doing things we're doing a lot more direct mailing we're doing actual phone calls, and we are meeting in parks we are actually having in parks on Monday night they had a neighborhood meeting safety meeting right at Mary del park using social distancing so we're, that is one spot that neighbors I think feel a lot more comfortable having a meeting instead of face to face. And what we're also doing is we took a survey now this kind of data is more on a neighborhood level than a national or city level. We're actually doing a survey talking about. Right, it's not about proximity it's about how people can get to parks what they can see when they get there are their restrooms are their hand washing stations are their baby changing stations are there are their gathering spaces for larger gatherings. All of that is going to play into what we hope to ultimately figure out about what our parks and how our parks can serve our residents past. And it really is and I know benita touched on that but to us and some of our neighbors because we are highly have a lot of refugees, a very large number of refugees living in the north end that it really is geographical and social isolation has always been a problem, especially when some folks automatically move into larger apartment complexes. So getting out and talking to the folks and getting them out into the parks and doing culturally relevant situations and activities is hugely important to us. So it's all about just this complication about how we're all handling COVID and handling how people are thinking and their priorities have changed so much. But parks we see is still a huge priority at least in the north end because they're being used dramatically more this time of the year this year than last year, especially neighborhood parks. So you're seeing that demand and you're able to maybe potentially link that demand to the budgeting right within St. Paul. Right and it's so yes and it's so much easier to actually be out there and do clipboards and talk to people so even social distancing when they're already at the parks and trying to grab them like an event or something. So yeah, ultimately what we do and what we learn from with our friends of the north end parks and with our surveys and with our face to face and one to one discussions will ultimately, it'll segue into the parks piece of our our neighborhood comprehensive plan that is ultimately adopted into the city's comp plan and probably next year we're hoping so this is just hugely exciting for us to have this work move forward. Yeah, yeah individually get funded. And if you don't mind me adding on to that I was going to say the reason why you know we're so excited about working with the district councils in the twin cities because I mean they are Carter. You know the comp plan of the comp plan 2040 does include again this high ambitious goal of bringing all residents within a 10 minute walk of home, a park within a 10 minute walk of home and again, there's the proximity piece with the fact that we have very active civil society. You know, that's really has a seat at the table, helping build their plans at the local level, helping that feed into the municipal plan. It's just a very commendable example of the work that I think in ideal state we have that top down grassroots level conversation happening. And the best of the work that we'd love to see scaled across the country. Absolutely and I mean it's in and beneath you highlighted this but but you know budgets are tight right now. And and so being able to make a clear cases is very important, especially at the neighborhood level. We are at the 15 minute mark I do want to make sure that that in our answers moving forward we can we can potentially talk about the rebuild to and what that that can that can look like but but I want to call in Lillian to elevate some of the questions that we're hearing from the audiences and and then we'll, we'll all come back in about 10 minutes. Great. Well, great discussion ladies. I'll start first with a question around whether it seems to me it strikes at like the permanence of this kind of work so one of our audience members asked if coven magically went away tomorrow. Can that change your approach or do you think this is really the way that cities should be designing the communities of the future and coven is in some ways, an opportunity to kind of just accelerate and move quickly on it. I can weigh in there. See, I think the pandemic and again, sort of the civic discourse that's happening at the local level both again highlighted how important it is to have green space certainly at a permanent level but we've also seen how communities can get quite creative with free spaces and pop up opportunities. But more than anything, it's the issue around having places for people to congregate and connect with each other is very clear as there's I think a real case case around that. And I think that, you know, all of it's not just about parks and green space what we're talking about is really transforming cities and read and reimagining cities right to be greener to think about them as being more climate resilient to be healthier. This is why the campaign, you know, we work with city leadership but we also think it's important for us to bring in folks from the transportation field and from the climate field to really talk about the ways of rebuilding in a much more holistic way that is healthier for all people in cities. Carrie, do you see any changes happening if we if our situation were to change pandemic wise or you think this work is is going to stick. I think the work is going to stick I think the only difference because of COVID as we've changed the way we've worked and the way we're trying to do the work it hasn't really it's not going to really upset upset like the apple card or upset the timelines that we have. It's just holding off on things and actually just rethinking the way we connect with people. Great. So there's a, you know, building on the way we connect with people there's a couple questions about just getting more specific both in terms of the approach you're taking. So, so care you had mentioned, you know, meeting at parks but can you talk a bit more about specific strategies for engagement when you can't do the traditional face to face and then there's also a couple questions of, could you be more specific about the kinds of questions and the kinds of interactions you're having with folks as you're as you're having this engagement. Yes, we are. We haven't really changed the way we work because we've always had a hybrid model about how we work with people and how we engage our community. But we are now doing a little bit more like everyone else is is is scheduling zoom meetings, and then trying to actually since we really can't do a lot of face to face like I'm saying it's, it's it's really challenging and that's that's a very very good question. It's a little bit of a difficult question to actually pinpoint exactly what we're doing we have a very diverse neighborhood and we have a lot of folks that are not on the internet that are not able to pop on and do a survey so doing it paper wise we have paper surveys available in little free libraries if people can do that. So it's the lack of meaning face to face and doing larger scale events has really put our engagement piece, a little bit behind, but I can't say that it's not going to be business as usual and we're not going to be able to continue to do this. Yeah, but neither any any other insights you have from from across the country on on the types of approaches that people are exploring in this new in terms of engagement. Yeah, no, I mean just very similar to what Kerry was saying just, you know, figuring out. I mean the technology is very important. Meeting in these open spaces very important but again I think that, you know, thinking about this in an equitable way, right. It's, I think the question will always remain how are we making sure that we're reaching out to our most hard to reach communities. And I think that that is something that we sort of looked our community partners to help us to cyber. And there is a question there was a question in here an example from an audience member about experience they've had in San Francisco and this is not a typical where there is a lot of engagement, and then the, you know, the design of the park doesn't really include the community input that was provided. How do you all ensure that the work that you do with community really does get incorporated into the outcome. I could answer a little bit of that real quickly. We've had to, we've had three projects. One was truck work nature sanctuary that the community spent almost 20 years to get the two trails connected. Another one is Sylvan that they just did one. It's a very large artificial church for soccer because kids just in people just are not playing the baseball anymore so we worked on that with new play areas and then Mary del Park got a new play area in Qatar courts. And I will tell you that I think sometimes, fortunately, it depends on how the parks department handles their piece of community engagement. Well, at least the north end has been just lucky enough to have people that go out there, and actually do the community engagement that want people to talk about it want moms to say, Well, if you put this bench so close to this, you know, this is going to be an issue with this piece of play equipment. So we've been lucky enough to have a lot of engagement that way through parks and rack and then working with the staff at the design departments coming in and figuring out the designs and, and looking at the partners like 12 moms and dads and other community members that really designed the playground equipment at Sylvan so we've been fortunate enough to be able to work like that. Great. I'll just tease out two more questions I think are really practical and interesting so one on the funding side of things. Are you seeing federal dollars that can help support work around parks and or there's another question in the queue of how you see the community benefits agreement to to also assist in the development of these spaces. So in term at the federal level, we were really excited about that that the Land Water Conservation Act has been fun has been fully funded that just came into law about a week and a half ago. And so our hope as a trust for public lands been working on that issue for about 15 years 1520 years to ensure that we can draw down that money towards municipal governments and communities that really are in highest need. And so we are seeing that happen in the at the federal down to local level, and we'll just continue to work in that way I think that just want to speak very quickly about some of what we're seeing around community engagement, just in response to carries a little bit, which is that you know we don't want to necessarily hold communities speak to the fire say speak to the fire but we think the resources and the funding question is really important. You know, we hope that the work that we do helps encourage municipal governments and leaders to reallocate resources and reprioritize this idea of community engagement and ensure that potentially that we can have they could hire staff that really and go out to those communities and ensure that that connection is there. We think that the work that we're doing from a private funding perspective with Kerry's team and others across the country is helping with that. But we think a lot of our sort of overarching engagement work with cities is hoping we're hoping to encourage that across the country as well. And then lastly, and I'll turn it over to Lily, any opportunities you've you've seen or you think there could be with community benefits agreement. Is that for Kerry for either of you. I know at our end we really haven't really thought of that at this point in time, but I will say that any additional funding from anywhere certainly does assist us. And, you know the 10 minute walk really helps our community in getting more equitable disbursement of investment and getting these conversations going about creating, you know safe and really welcoming spaces that are culturally relevant for our neighborhood. And I think that when we don't and small as being a small, very small organization, when we don't have the capacity to add more and we don't have the funding to add more. Some things like this just might have taken more of a backseat than a forward seat. The point that we don't want to work on it is just that our capacity is sometimes so so much smaller and being able to have the 10 minute walk we've been able to have our community organizer work directly on this for for hours so it really is a huge benefit. Yeah, and certainly we see a lot of our own cities, leveraging community benefit funds and agreements as well as impact fees and a lot of sort of creative ways of working with local developers and communities on driving funding. I think we'll we'll emphasize that the website to the 10 minute walk is on our chat and then Lily, if you want to come back out and close this out. Great. Great. Thank you and and thanks, Lillian. Benita and Kerry, we do have a minute left and I would love to just invite you to just make a final, you know, have a final comment on what you see as the potential opportunity. And this moment in time and this moment in time around COVID and this moment in time of the racial reckoning that we're going on in our country around public spaces. So Benita just just 30 seconds if you could just tell us what is the opportunity that we have right now. The opportunity is really about as as you know, the Knight Foundation as our fund or the JPB Foundation we're all sort of talking about is again reimagining our cities to be healthier and greener and to really see the benefits that we've seen over the last four months and not not let that message fall to the bottom rate that the cities need nature or kids need nature and parks and green space are essential critical infrastructure for cities. And now more than ever, and, you know, as we get beyond the pandemic and all of these, the sort of the crises, we really will continue to drive for that message and work with our leaders on on ensuring that that's a sustainable solution for all of us. Great. Kerry, at a neighborhood level, what do you see as the opportunity. The biggest opportunity for us right now is taking a look at the parks systems throughout our neighborhood and other parts of the city of St. Pop, and really ensuring that that folks can actually access the park safely. And we can read some of the barriers and work on some of the barriers that make it difficult to difficult for people to get to the parks, like a busy street or railroad track. And we are looking at that. So I really think that that is it's a benefit to actually look at that and then to see actually who's using the parks and what is really necessary to have people to continue to use the parks. Great, great. Well, 10 minute wall campaign, amazing resource in our communities across the country. Thank you for joining us and and chatting about this really important topic. And and I am also excited, Lillian about next week, which I don't think you'll be joining next week. We will miss you. We have Dan Biederman on and he is going to be talking about activation and placemaking. What does that look like during a pandemic. So it should be really interesting of course he works all across the country. And it should be a really fun conversation. So with that, I will see you later. Thank you.